I nominate this post for worst idea of the century.

It is difficult to comment without sounding obnoxious, but having taken the bar exam, I found the exam simple. Surprisingly simple. I think it was the single most over hyped experience of my life. I was fed all this insecurity and walked into the convention center expecting to participate in the biggest intellectual challenge in my life. Instead, it was endless multiple choice questions and a couple contrived scenarios for essays.

It may also be surprising to some to understand that legal writing is prized for its degree of formalism. It aims to remove all connotation from a message so as to minimize misunderstanding, much like clean code.

It may also be surprising, but the goal when writing a legal brief or judicial opinion is not to try to sound smart. The goal is to be clear, objective, and thereby, persuasive. Using big words for the sake of using big words, using rare words, using weasel words like "kind of" or "most of the time" or "many people are saying", writing poetically, being overly obtuse and abstract, these are things that get your law school application rejected, your brief ridiculed, and your bar exam failed.

The simpler your communication, the more formulaic, the better. The more your argument is structured, akin to a computer program, the better.

As compared to some other domain, such as fiction, good legal writing much easier for an attention model to simulate. The best exam answers are the ones that are the most formulaic and that use the smallest lexicon and that use words correctly.

I only want to add this comment because I want to inform how non-lawyers perceive the bar exam. Getting an attention model to pass the bar exam is a low bar. It is not some great technical feat. A programmer can practically write a semantic disambiguation algorithm for legal writing from scratch with moderate effort.

It will be a good accomplishment, but it will only be a stepping stone. I am still waiting for AI to tackle messages that have greater nuance and that are truly free form. LLMs are still not there yet.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is one of my favorite coffee table books. Props for a Tufte reference!

The well deserved bad rap for MS is waning. They made some changes in the last few years that seem to be a step in the right direction. I will give them the benefit of the doubt. For now.

Do the same thing you might do when browsing open source code on github. Go to websites of well known companies or by people that provide web design services, view source, look at a feature that doesn't make sense at first, and then search on Google or Mozilla Developer Network or Stackoverflow for more details, and then write a practice page in a basic text editor.

As far as design, you cannot go wrong with bootstrap. However, to really learn design, do not study web design. Study things like Bahaus, billboard design, marketing and messaging and PR, how to compose for simplicity, SEO optimization techniques and their influence on design, etc. Seriously, the people that learn how to make websites and want to tell you how to make websites absolutely and hilariously SUCK at design.

Generally, when a visitor visits a website, which I call an interaction, then they must agree to its terms of service. This forms a contractual relationship. Contracts are private, and outside of things like not promising to do something illegal, it is up to each party to decide on its terms. In this case the website generally decides on the terms, and then the visitor opts into them through use of the website. Much of the issue lies within contract formation. When a lawsuit happens later, one thing that is frequently questioned is whether the contract is valid. A common angle is to claim the the contract is invalid because it was not correctly formed. Bad contract formation. For example, in a different setting, you didn't sign your name on the dotted line when buying a house or something like that, so there was never a contractual agreement, so there was never an actual sale, etc.

However, there is case law (law made by judges who hear cases and issue opinions) that says that sometimes contracts can be implicitly formed. For example, if you as a website visitor are given proper notice of a website's terms of use, and then you continue to the use website, you have implicitly agreed to the terms of the use. Even if you didn't sign anything, or check any box somewhere saying you agree. No explicit action has to take place.

Except, that is not exactly worldwide statutory law (laws passed by government and written down in the books with codes like Law #1234.56). While the issue of formation is mostly settled, there is still some room for creative legal maneuvering. Aka lawyering the shit of things. Aka screwing things up because someone with deep pockets is paying you to win using any angle you can get.

This cookies notice and agreement probably falls right into this category. And while it is generally settled law that the contract is formed even without this agreement, some schmuck somewhere still thinks there is wiggle room, but it is merely case law and not exactly authoritative, especially not in the international setting.

When in doubt, lawyers adhere to CYA. Cover your ass. Use the narrowest, most conservative, safest interpretation of the law. In this case, there is this tiny bit of doubt, so CYA. Just in case.

I personally believe you can make a good argument that contract is implicitly formed merely from continued use, and the notion of requiring express consent is outdated. The law is catching up to how things are done online, the trend is rather obvious, and anyone whining about it is probably just some established cash cow business that somehow wants to manipulate the market to further extend its antiquated business practices and is willing to spend millions on dollars on go screw yourself legal teams.

So, yes, you could theoretically get in trouble. But you are not likely to, and anyone suggesting otherwise probably has an ulterior motive.

I think it is still current, and is a decent read. Like, you should know these things, but not necessarily adhere to them. I spent a decade believing in OOP. Lately, my thoughts have changed. Unless you really need to track non-global state, or need a namespace in a language that doesn't have namespaces, I don't think you need to go down the OOP route as far as Mr. Bloch advocates. Sometimes a simple function just gets the job done, clearly and effectively.